Survival and resistance, the price of liberty and the necessity of solidarity, the fragility of power and the futility of tyrannies of force and control before the unanswerable power of refusal to submit or obey, the redemptive power of love as community and the alliance of autonomous peoples in a free society of equals, and the transformational nature of freedom as the choice to remain unconquered; on this day of the twin anniversaries of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and Italian Liberation Day we celebrate the glorious triumph of our forebears as antifascists and the lessons we can learn from our history.
What can we learn from the Liberation of Italy, and from all liberations from fascist regimes throughout history and the world, as antifascists, revolutionaries, truth tellers, and bearers of the Promethean Fire which is democracy?
The great secret of power is that it is fragile and brittle; force and control fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Who cannot be compelled by force is free. In resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered.
To resist is to be free, and this is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us. Refusal to submit is the defining human act and seizure of power, and this is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
In this we are all brothers, sisters, and others; all of us a United Humankind with a duty of care for each other beyond all differences.
Time to make an end to the age of empires, to monarchies and to tyrannies of force and control, to hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and to divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; let us throw open the gates of our prisons and our borders, and be free.
As I wrote in my post of April 25 2020, Anniversaries of the Italian Victory Over Fascism and End of the Italian Civil War and the Carnation Revolution of Portugal; Celebrate with me today the twin anniversaries of the Italian victory over fascism and the Carnation Revolution which liberated Portugal from fifty years of tyranny. Together these two historical events and processes provide us with exemplary models of effective action in the struggle toward democracy and the true equality of humankind.
Three decades of Antifascism in Italy, culminating in the twenty months of Resistance to the German Occupation, not only shaped the Allied victory and the Liberation of Europe, but was also a struggle to transform the cultural basis from which fascism arose; authoritarianism, patriarchy, nepotism and graft, and the networks of patron-client relationships which have persisted as the formal basis of European society since the Roman Empire. As Stephanie Prezioso writes in Jacobin “the Resistance was not only a war of national liberation, but also a civil war and a class war — a social war that implicated the population itself.”
But what is most relevant to us today is the way in which this multifaceted war was waged and won; for it was anarchic and destructured, self-organizing and embodying forms of mutualism, nonhierarchical and democratic in the best sense of free societies of equals. As the people of Hong Kong say of their art of revolution, “Be like water”. Again as described by Stephanie Prezioso; “Autonomy, anti-bureaucratic demands, voluntarism, “free initiative from below,” and the role of the individual – not of the “mass” – were the inner secrets to this libertarian and revolutionary liberalism, attached to social revolution”.
How does the history of the Italian Antifascist Resistance continue to shape and inform our struggle today? Here we must dive into the deep well of memory, and situate our moment in the context of the century which has unfolded since our origins in the world’s first Antifascist Resistance, that of the Arditi del Popolo founded in 1921 to resist Mussolini and the rise of Fascism. The Aditi del Popolo, a worker’s army whose defense of the communes at the Barricades of Parma became legendary, arose in mutual interdependence with the anarcho-syndicalism of Bakunin’s comrade Enrico Malatesta and the Free State of Fiume of the poet and General Gabriele D’Annunzio, the latter of which continues to influence the global Autonomous Zones movements today.
When we founded the first of the current network of such, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, having seized the business and state government district, I had a copy of Bruce Sterling’s novelization of D’Annunzio’s Fiume, Pirate Utopia, from which I read to the masses who seized the police headquarters. A cautionary tale as well as an inspiring and romantic model, for in the Free State of Fiume D’Annunzio both established an iconic anarchist-syndicalist commune but also created Fascism; it is a foundational study of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force and why revolutions become tyrannies. In centering my idea of Living Autonomous Zones in a critique of the historical emergence of Fascism from the Anarchist total rejection of state power and of nationalism from internationalist socialism, I question the social use of force as a ground of struggle intrinsic to all human exchange in the duality of its forms as fear and belonging.
As I wrote in my post of June 11 2023, Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone; Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities had ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are also become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by Homeland Security and the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life and liberty regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history and reflects the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s, Rojava in Syria and Exarcheia in Athens, but was directly modeled on the ideals, methods, and instruments of the Occupy Movement founded in New York’s Wall Street.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to occupy City Hall in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the globalization of the Revolution and the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by David Broder in Jacobin, in an article entitled The Lost Partisans; “Today Italy celebrates Liberation Day. But the true spirit of the antifascist resistance has long been obscured.
Italy’s April 25 bank holiday marks the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism. This day in 1945, antifascist partisan units freed the northern industrial centers of Milan and Turin from the grip of Hitler and Mussolini’s remaining loyalists, after Allied forces had swept through the country. Just three days later, in a humiliating epitaph to the twenty-year regime, partisans captured and executed il Duce and his entourage, hanging them upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.
Marking the partisans’ victory over both German occupation and Italian fascism, April 25 is a patriotic holiday that honors the deeds of an armed minority. The festival was first celebrated in 1946, as the parties of the National Liberation Committee (CLN) from Christian Democrats to Socialists and Communists sought to identify themselves with “universal” values of freedom, democracy, and national unity.
Tellingly, Liberation Day would be celebrated on the day that the CLN for upper Italy declared its power, not the date of the Allies’ final liberation of Italian territory.
However, while the CLN parties’ claim to represent “a whole people in arms” delimited a broad national community excluding only the last fascist loyalists — held to be German stooges, and not true patriots — April 25 has never really lived up to its pretentions of national unity.
This is not only because the remaining battalions of the far right have their own war commemorations at Mussolini’s Predappio hometown, but also because the armed resistance has always been principally identified in popular culture with Italy’s once-mass Communist Party (PCI).
Although still today presidents and prime ministers commemorate April 25 as a founding moment of Italian democracy, the street rallies marking this holiday above all represent the politics that did not shape the postwar republic.
Whereas 60 percent of partisans fought in PCI-organized units, the Communist Party shared the CLN’s political leadership with Christian Democrats, liberals, socialists, and others; and as the intense antifascist mobilization turned into the foundation of a parliamentary democracy, old elites soon reasserted their control over the state.
Indeed, if the CLN parties governed Italy in coalition after liberation — together drafting a constitution and founding a republic — by May 1947 Cold War pressures forced the PCI out of office. As justice minister in 1946, the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti had issued a sweeping amnesty applying even to fascists, in order to pacify social tensions; yet as the Left was sidelined, partisans themselves became the target of political trials pursued by ex-fascist judges and policemen.
The gap between the partisan fighters and the postwar establishment was further symbolized on April 25, 1947, with the dissolution of the second-most resistance force, the republican-socialist Action Party.
The anticommunist counteroffensive following liberation peaked in July 1948, with an assassination attempt against Togliatti. The far-right assailant’s attack not only sparked an unruly general strike but was also a trigger for many ex-partisans who had held onto their weapons, who mounted widespread armed occupations of workplaces and police stations in subsequent days.
Frightened PCI leaders feared provoking a civil war like in Greece, where British-backed royalists bloodily crushed the Communist partisans after 1945. With the party thus reining in its more adventurist members, and Italy becoming a founder member of NATO in 1949, the hope of resistance turning into revolution quickly dissipated.
Having been the main resistance party, the PCI was thus condemned to an ambivalent relationship with the state born of April 25, and whose constitution it helped to write. The country’s second party — securing between 22 and 34 percent of the vote in every election until its 1991 collapse — the PCI was barred from power-sharing by Italy’s strategic position in the Western bloc, even despite leader Enrico Berlinguer’s 1970s efforts to reach a “historic compromise” with Christian Democracy.
Indeed, if April 25 is still today marked by rallies appealing to the constitution’s promise of a “democracy founded on labor,” for four decades the state was more than anything based on structural Christian Democratic dominance, the anticommunist linchpin of all Italian governments until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Although the Christian Democrats had been the PCI’s partners in the CLN and then in government in 1943–47, they had made a much lesser military contribution to the resistance, and on anniversaries like April 25 tended to emphasize the US Army’s role in liberating Italy far more than did the Communists.
Without doubt, the partisan war was greatly less important to Christian Democratic identity: a big-tent party of many factions, but also strong anticommunist tendencies, its further right-wing shore tended to portray the resistance as a bloody endeavor essentially unnecessary to the Allies’ success in freeing the country.
As such, whereas the Christian Democrats’ internal cohesion and claim to political authority in Cold War Italy was heavily premised on their binary opposition to the PCI, the Communists’ central means of asserting their democratic legitimacy was the commemoration of their non-sectarian, patriotic record in the war against Nazism.
This stemmed from resistance strategy itself: the Communist-led working class played the leading role in mobilizing for the patriotic struggle, but, as Togliatti explained in an April 1945 circular, PCI partisans establishing CLN authority in each location should not “impose changes in a socialistic or communist sense,” even if acting alone. The PCI had committed to a common antifascist cause, not sought to enforce its own control.
The party had thus used mass mobilization to secure itself a place in institutional life, but without antagonizing other democratic forces. Indeed, the PCI press of 1943–45 (and later party mythology) cast even the most evidently class-war aspects of the resistance — mass strikes, land occupations, draft resistance — in “patriotic” terms, a mass working-class contribution to a progressive national movement more than an assertion of workers’ anticapitalist class interests.
It was this conjugation of patriotism, democracy, and a sense of workers’ centrality to national reconstruction that informed the constitutional promise of a “democratic republic founded on labor.” In this same productivist spirit, in the 1945–47 coalition the PCI backed wage freezes and implemented an effective strike ban, the better to rebuild Italian industry.
That said, while the PCI portrayed its gradualist, institution-centric “Italian road to socialism” as an extension of Antonio Gramsci’s thinking, it in fact tended to invert Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, as leading socialist Lelio Basso emphasized in a 1965 piece for Critica Marxista.
“Notwithstanding the working-class movement’s organizational preponderance in the resistance, it was our opponents who managed to hegemonize it politically,” he explained. “National or antifascist unity had a sense in terms of the pure goal of winning the war,” but “only with a tighter working-class unity over immediate postwar goals could the workers’ movement have really hegemonized the liberation struggle, imposing its own spirit, stamp and will, its own ideology and objectives upon it.”
Founded on Labor
Indeed, by the time of Basso’s article the PCI strategy of a gradually expanding “progressive democracy” had begun to ring hollow, the party’s commitment to republican legality clashing with its Cold War reduction to an oppositional role.
Christian Democracy reigned supreme, and the far right was also seemingly on the rise, with Prime Minister Fernando Tambroni’s 1960 effort to form government resting on fascist MSI support, as well as the provocative attempt to stage an MSI congress in antifascist Genoa that same year. If violent protests blocked these efforts to rehabilitate the far right, the “democratic republic founded on labor” was not living up to the promise of the resistance.
The weakening of the PCI dream of progressive democracy also coincided with changes in the shape of the working class, with the high industrial growth rates of Italy’s 1950s-1960s “economic miracle” drawing masses of workers from the underdeveloped south to the factories of the north.
These workers, on the fringes of the traditional labor movement and suffering a semi-racialized discrimination, were central to the attentions of the 1960s New Left arising off the back of the PCI’s impasse.
Young and coming from a south little-marked by the resistance, these workers had a profound cultural split from the largely older, more skilled northern workers for whom the antifascist strikes of March 1943 represented a key moment of collective memory and class pride.
Tellingly, the operaista and autonomist literature (broadly conceived) of this period, breaking with the Communist Party’s rhetorical preoccupations, was notable for its lack of interest in resistance history, tending to see April 25 as a kind of PCI jamboree attached to patriotic-institutional politics, distant from the interests of the workers they sought to influence.
To the extent that the resistance did enter into the extra-parliamentary left’s consciousness, this was above all thanks to armed-struggle groups and their efforts to replicate the most spectacular military actions of 1943–45, also inspired by a wider veneration of guerrilla struggles in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Not only the Red Brigades’ invocation of the “continuing resistance” but also Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s creation of Gruppi d’Azione Partigiana (GAP) consciously imitating the similarly named wartime PCI terrorist cells reflected the desire to recapture the militancy of that period.
What rarely went considered in any of this was the political critique of the PCI strategy that had already in the 1940s been advanced by the most radical wing of the Italian resistance. Indeed, even the 1970s extra-parliamentary left tended to invoke the most militant forms of struggle from the war period (mass strikes, sabotage, terrorism) as abstract evidence of the potential for social change, rather than recover the history of those movements who had sought (and failed) to challenge the politics of national unity as such.
This was the reason why even a 1970s Guevarist paramilitary group like the GAP could copy the name of 1940s partisan units that were in fact entirely PCI-controlled and subordinate to its patriotic alliance strategy.
It seems that these groups were little aware that in 1943–45 there had also been revolutionary antifascist forces outside of the CLN, involved in armed struggle yet excluded from institutional resistance memory. Certainly, in a broad sense we could say that the symbolism of even PCI-led partisans (with their Bella Ciao, Bandiera Rossa, Fischia il Vento, red neckerchiefs . . .) and resistants’ individual motives for joining the struggle often reflected hope in some sort of socialist change, even if defined in vague terms.
But there were also thousands-strong 1940s movements who organized with this explicit political perspective, rejecting national unity in favor of class warfare — from Stella Rossa in Turin to Rome’s Bandiera Rossa and Naples’s “red” CGL union.
These were no minoritarian sects: in fact, Bandiera Rossa was the largest resistance force in Wehrmacht-occupied Rome. Arising from clandestine groups that had formed in the fascist period while PCI leaders were still in exile, and combining militant antifascism with an almost millenarian faith in imminent revolution, this autodidact-led movement built something of a mass base in the capital’s borgate slums in winter 1943–44, waging nine months of urban warfare at the cost of some 186 fatalities.
Believing that Red Army successes on the Eastern Front reflected the world-historic advance of socialism (“turning war into revolution like Lenin in 1917”) this curiously ultra-Stalinist movement ultimately entered into bitter clashes with the official PCI, which sought to infiltrate and destroy its organization.
Indeed, the movement’s radicalism threatened not only the PCI’s internal discipline, but also the orderly transition to democracy itself: as one military police report warned the Allied forces approaching the Italian capital in May 1944, Bandiera Rossa had “the secret aim, together with the other far-Left parties, of seizing control of the city, overthrowing the monarchy and government, and implementing a full communist program while the other parties are preoccupied with chasing out the Germans.”
The subversive threat these communists posed saw their militias (deemed by British intelligence to have been “mainly drawn from the criminal classes”) immediately banned upon the Allies’ liberation of the capital.
The suppression of Bandiera Rossa’s incendiary press and the forcible disarming of its partisans was no isolated case: the state’s assertion of a monopoly of violence and criminalization of its opponents was, in a sense, the founding act of republican legality, with the Allies combining with the CLN parties simultaneously to liberate territory and to impose a quick return to social peace.
The state born of the resistance was, therefore, also a state born of the neutering of the resistance; the channeling of antagonistic class warfare into working-class representation in the state via the Communist and Socialist parties. Such was the democratic republic “founded on labor.”
Postmodern April 25
Today the PCI, self-declared “party of the resistance,” is dead, much like its Socialist and Christian Democratic counterparts. The collapse of the USSR exploded the Italian system’s Cold War binary in 1991, with the removal of the Communist threat finally detonating the rotten corruption networks that had so long flourished in its Christian-Democratic rival. If April 25 still lives on as a day of memorialization, it does so absent of the parties who actually took part in the struggle.
With ever-reduced ranks of surviving veterans, and the Left in a dire state of collapse, the resistance’s role in Italian public life seems to be on the wane. Indeed, the end of the once mass PCI has clearly handed the initiative to the long-time opponents of the antifascist cause.
Not only have revisionist historians increasingly sought to establish an equivalence of the crimes perpetrated by each side in the “civil war,” but the last Berlusconi government even toyed with getting rid of the Liberation Day bank holiday.
Simultaneous to this, resistance memory is also undermined from within, as former PCI-ers adapt the old slogans to their now neoliberal politics, as in president Giorgio Napolitano’s April 25 intervention in 2013. Speaking at a former SS prison, the ex-Communist called on the incoming government to show “the same courage, resolve, and unity that were vital to winning the resistance battle” in dealing with the country’s economic crisis.
The coalition he was orchestrating was a lash-up of the centrist Democrats with Silvio Berlusconi and Goldman Sachs technocrat Mario Monti; national unity had now became the banner of austerian collective belt-tightening.
No wonder, then, that April 25 seems increasingly distant from the concerns of today’s unemployed and precarious youth — the “national day” instead living on mainly in the memory of the various fragments of the former PCI.
Yet with that party’s hegemonic project dead, it seems unlikely that talk of “defending constitutional values” or invoking “national unity” or the “republican ethics” of seventy years ago can play any role in the regeneration of the Left.
If anything, it is dissecting and questioning this legacy that can return the memory of the partisans to its proper place, turning April 25 from a day of national unity into a day of anti-institutional antagonism.”
As written by STEFANIE PREZIOSO in Jacobin, in an article entitled The Anti-Fascist Revolution: Remembering the Action Party, one of Italy’s biggest anti-fascist partisan movements.; “Over the last two decades, the Italian Resistance has been a subject of sharp public debate, with both political and historical efforts “radically to repudiate the role and significance” of anti-fascism in Italy’s contemporary history. As Pier Giorgio Zunino wrote in 1997, “for the Italian history of the second half of the twentieth century, anti-fascism is the villain.”
Indeed, most often simply identified with its Comintern (Communist International) variant, the anti-fascism of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s is branded “anti-democratic” because of its “blind[ness]” to the other “enemies of democracy,” as the Italian revisionist Renzo de Felice put it. Attacks on the twenty-month-long Resistance are essentially concentrated on its minoritarian character (thus seeing the anti-fascist parties as a mere second edition of the National Fascist Party itself) and the “cruelty” of the “violence” committed during the civil war and the months following Liberation.
Italy is a country where the “negative memory” of this experience fuses with the political uses made of that memory. In this context, what is especially challenged “decade after decade” is the central, epoch-defining character of this period for the history of the dominated.
This is because, between September 8, 1943 — the date that the Badoglio’s post-fascist government signed an armistice with the Allies, triggering a German occupation of northern-central Italy — and April 25, 1945 — the date of the final liberation of Italy’s great northern cities — the Resistance was not only a war of national liberation, but also a civil war and a class war — a social war that implicated the population itself.
Of course, not all “the people” were in the “maquis,” as the title of Communist leader Luigi Longo’s Un popolo alla macchia might suggest. But a large part of the Italian population thought that the end of fascism should mean a challenge not just to the regime itself, but also to the Italian state as it had formed after the Risorgimento [national unification struggle of the mid-nineteenth century], and indeed, to bourgeois society as a whole. In this sense, anti-fascism really represented a positive struggle, with a political and social charge that projected itself into the future.
In this context of a radical challenge to the existing order, the Action Party (Partito d’Azione or Pd’A), throughout its brief existence, played a very specific role. Created in 1942 and dissolved in 1947, over the twenty months of civil war the Pd’A was an advocate for the radical transformation of Italian society.
This advocacy also translated into practice; in the war of Resistance that raged, especially in Northern Italy, from September 1943 onward, the Action Party made a relatively unparalleled contribution, offering the greatest number of combatants to the armed struggle. Giovanni de Luna captured this reality with his reference to the “party of the shot.” The Pd’A made a major contribution to the insurrections of April 1945, in particular in Turin.
The living embodiment of a revolutionary “wind from the North,” azionismo also laid down a lasting system of values founded on anti-fascism. It considered anti-fascism not only in conjunctural terms — as a fight against the regime Mussolini had established from 1922 onward — but as a perpetual duty.
This was summarized in April 1934 by Carlo Rosselli, founder of the secular, non-communist Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Libertà or GL) movement. A figure whose memory was forever part of the Pd’A after his 1937 murder by fascists, Rosselli spoke of anti-fascism as “a struggle for eternity.”
“We Are at War”
Azionismo was rooted in the anti-fascism of the liberal revolutionary Piero Gobetti, who died in 1926 under the blows of the fascist squadristi; as well as its early 1930s political actualization by GL, the movement of the revolutionary socialist Carlo Rosselli and, among others, Emilio Lussu, a member of the Sardinian Partito d’Azione. Based in Paris in the 1930s, Rosselli and Lussu were both escapees from the island of Lipari, where they had been confined by the Fascist regime.
For Piero Gobetti, fascism was “the autobiography of the nation.” On November 23, 1922, in a famous article entitled “Eulogy to the guillotine,” he wrote:
Fascism… has been the autobiography of the nation. A nation that believes in class collaboration; a nation that renounces political struggle, on account of its own sloth…. Fascism in Italy is a catastrophe, and it is an indication of a decisive infantileness, for it marks the triumph of facility, of confidence granted, of optimism, of enthusiasms.
This interpretation emphasized the elements of continuity between liberal Italy and fascist Italy and the idea of a missed Risorgimento – meaning an unaccomplished process of political unification and economic modernization. From this perspective, fascism was the result of this missing liberal/bourgeois revolution, and the expression of a backward and “uncultured” country whose only political experience was one of systems of government that combined clientelism, paternalism, transformism and authoritarianism.
Fascism was thus the expression of “an old ill, rooted in the distant past of Italian history.” This interpretation combined with the idea that it was necessary to fight not only fascism itself, but all that had made it possible. This emphasized the role of the Italian ruling class in the affirmation and stabilization of the regime.
During the 1930s, this line of interpretation would develop, in the context of an anti-fascist struggle waged in secrecy and exile. This fight now confronted a clearly established regime and a regimented country, in years that the revisionist historian Renzo de Felice described in terms of “consensus.”
The revolutionary socialist Carlo Rosselli developed his own analysis of fascism based on Gobetti’s reflections, among others, discussing the development of what he from the early 1930s called “the anti-fascist revolution,” and refining its repertoires of action.
In January 1932, the first issue of the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà asserted the need to pass from “the phase of a negative and indistinct anti-fascism” to that of the affirmation of a “constructive anti-fascism that understands and transcends the fascist experience and the experiences of post-[World War I] Europe.”
Founded on the combined Mazzinian imperatives of “thought and action,” in a March 1931 circular addressed “To the Workers,” GL presented itself as a “revolutionary movement” aimed at overthrowing fascism by insurrectionary means. Carlo Rosselli and the members of GL conceived their political engagement as a radical rupture from fascism, but so, too, from pre-fascist Italy.
In this sense, they constantly repeated that there could be no question of fighting to return to “l’Italietta di Facta” [referring to pre-Mussolini liberal prime minister Luigi Facta]. What united the militants of GL was “the revolt against the men, the mentality, and the methods of the pre-fascist political world” (“Per l’unificazione politica del proletariato,” GL, May 14, 1937).
It also targeted the Italian Socialists, who had reduced themselves to impotence. We might particularly note the rather severe analysis Emilio Lusso gave of the Socialists’ collapse faced with the rise of fascism in his February 1934 article “Orientamenti”:
The masses were brilliantly guided toward catastrophe… It took just a few mercenary brigands, gathered in such little time, to destroy the results of forty years of proletarian organization. It took not a flurry of machine-gun fire but only the rumble of a milk truck to disband what ought to have been the revolutionary army.
The renewal of socialism and the anti-fascist struggle were thus envisaged as two interdependent and inextricably linked phases. GL advocated the defeat of pre-fascist political configurations, presenting itself in terms of “unity of action” among socialists, republicans, and liberals, and seeking to revive the struggle on Italian territory, if necessary using illegal and violent means.
From 1930 onward, GL cells formed mainly in the towns of Northern Italy and in intellectual circles. This was the only non-Communist movement to construct a real network, and the Pd’A [formally constituted in 1942] would base itself on this, as it built its forces around such figures as Riccardo Bauer, Ernesto Rossi, Francesco Fancello, Nello Traquandi, Umberto Ceva, Vincenzo Calace, Dino Roberti, Giuliano Viezzoli, Ferruccio Parri, and many others. While this social and militant base was principally among intellectuals, this small circle would become a hardened troop, ready to take up arms.
GL, the Pd’A, and the Revolution
Indeed, fascism placed the young (liberal and/or socialist) intellectuals, as the basis of GL, and the Pd’A in a paradoxical situation. The regime established by Mussolini seemed to position the “rearguard” fight for the defense of democratic freedoms as the order of the day. There is no doubt that the anti-fascist engagement of liberals like Ernesto Rossi or Riccardo Bauer was built precisely around this primary revolt, more moral than political.
Yet it was at precisely this moment that the fight for freedom emancipated itself from the historical and theoretical frameworks in which it had emerged. It broke away from the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it adopted more complex notions that resolutely anchored it in the era beginning in October of 1917.
Piero Gobetti was again at the heart of this way of conceiving anti-fascism, which combined liberalism with exhortations to revolution. Over the course of his short life, he consistently emphasized that his liberalism was rooted in the concrete experience of the struggles of the downtrodden, with the Turin factory councils of 1919-20 and the soviets in Russia in his view marking their most complete expression.
Gobetti thus saw the workers’ movement as “freedom on the way to establishing itself” and the October Revolution as “an affirmation of liberalism” because it broke “a centuries-long slavery” in creating an “agrarian democracy,” a state in which “the people have faith.”
Autonomy, anti-bureaucratic demands, voluntarism, “free initiative from below,” and the role of the individual – not of the “mass” – were the inner secrets to this libertarian and revolutionary liberalism, attached to social revolution and fully anchored in the twentieth century. GL drew on this same thread in the 1930s. Thus, the question posed was “reconciling the political and social potential of the Russian Revolution with the scientific, humanistic, liberal legacy of the West.”
If fascism reflected Italians’ moral, political, and cultural immaturity – in short, a “lack of character” – then building a new political order must inevitably proceed via a revolutionary struggle. This was a struggle in which active minorities would play an exemplary role, and which would “then spread among wide layers of the population.”
One of the challenges this posed was how to envisage a revolutionary process in a country that had never seen any large-scale revolutionary phenomenon, the “popular and revolutionary Risorgimento” having been swept aside by the monarchy, the clergy, agrarian feudalism, and finance.
From this perspective, the anti-fascist revolution could be a “social and moral” second Risorgimento, which would result in the emancipation of the workers. Over the 1930s – for GL’s Carlo Rosselli in particular – the revolution became more clearly proletarian, and anti-fascism became synonymous with anti-capitalism.
This was not an abstract anti-capitalism, but a “concrete and historical” one founded on the observation and the conviction that liberal democracy had exhausted its historical role. The post-World War I crisis of democracy and the crisis of capitalism thus became potent factors in the interpretation of the struggle that must now be fought.
The Pd’A structured itself around themes linked to the origins of fascism and the anti-fascist revolution, questions which Carlo Rosselli in particular had posed within GL. While the onset of World War II broke up the networks constituted in exile (especially in France) it would also constitute the terrain in which these new political orientations could be tested in practice.
As Leonardi Paggi put it, we can here see “the war’s absolutely leading role not only as a factor for the destruction of the old order, but also as the site of the reconstruction of a new one.”
Indeed, “the fascist war” (from 1940–43) would play a fundamental role in driving the rise of a properly anti-fascist social and political consciousness, taking on ever wider proportions. The strike wave of March 1943 and the outpourings of joy on July 25 of that same year, as Italians greeted the news of Mussolini’s downfall, each bore witness to this.
Moreover, during the civil war of 1943 to 1945, the anti-fascism that had built up over twenty years of fascism and that etched itself on the body of a devastated, “marytred” country, now transformed into a real movement driven by men and women and by their hopes and expectations. The immediate trigger for the formation of the Action Party was, of course, the war. Yet it was also driven by the heartfelt need for an unremitting struggle, by and through the war, against everything in the process of modern Italy’s construction that had led to disaster.
From its creation in June 1942, the Pd’A presented itself as the rallying point for the diverse elements of non-Communist anti-fascism of both socialist and liberal orientations. The Pd’A was, first of all, composed of members of the liberal-socialist movement founded among young intellectual circles in central Italy in 1937 by Guido Calogero and Aldo Capitini, whose 1940 program called for the formation of a “common front for freedom.”
In July 1943, this current was joined by the militants of GL, which became a socialist unity movement under the direction of Emilio Lussu after the 1937 assassination of Carlo Rosselli. On March 3, 1943, GL, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party signed a pact for unity in action, advocating “a national insurrection to smash fascism’s policy of war.”
As Giovanni de Luna emphasizes in his book (which is sadly yet to be translated), the different souls of the Action Party were nonetheless united by the conception of politics its militants constructed – a politics considered inextricably linked to morality – and by the constant search for means of action to respond to Italy’s concrete needs, particularly those of its peasant, worker and intellectual layers, in order to radically change the social and political order.
Hence the party’s “republican prejudice” and its calls for change in Italy’s state structure and its economy. Among the seven points of the Pd’A’s June 1942 political program, we might mention: decentralization of power to the local level; the nationalization of monopolies; land reform; trade-union freedom; and the separation of church and state. The Italian historian Claudio Pavone thus recalled how the “Action Party spoke in its program of its intent to establish a socialism for new times” and how this party had expressed a “utopia, as the aspiration for the utmost.”
The question of the means of struggle was at the center of the debates at the Pd’A’s national congress on September 5-7, 1943 – a congress held before the armistice [between the post-coup Badoglio government and the Anglo-Americans] was declared, and with German troops having spread across Italian territory from July to September. The idea of a war of national liberation here translated into the understanding that it would now be necessary to wage a large-scale war. The GL brigades would now constitute the Pd’A’s armed wing, under Ferruccio Parri’s command.
These brigades were conceived as sites for the consolidation and/or emergence of a social and political consciousness, even if recruitment for the Pd’A brigades was a lot more selective than that which took place in the Communist-led Garibaldi brigades. Dante Livio Bianco wrote:
[T]rue political work in partisan formations consisted not so much of giving ‘lectures’ or of forcing partisans to read the political press, as of touching (and that was how it was – even only touching) on the key points, uncovering them and bringing them out of the generic, the confused, the indistinct, and instead proposing these points – even in their most basic form – to the individual consciousness, thereby drawing out new motives for action.
But the debate also concerned the definition of the struggle itself: was this a struggle for national liberation and/or a “democratic” revolution? For the militants of the Pd’A, the one necessarily went hand-in-hand with the other, but the contents of this democratic revolution were differently defined even within the party – more radically so among former GL militants, and in more liberal terms among others.
Yet all agreed on an intransigent opposition to Badoglio’s post-fascist regime under the “Kingdom of the South” [ruling Allied-occupied regions after September 1943], and on a relentless search for unity in action among the parties of the Left. Throughout the Resistance war, the azionisti thought that Italy’s concrete situation could result in processes “of a revolutionary character.”
“You are either for revolution or for reforms,” Pd’A secretary for Northern Italy Leo Viliani wrote, “and we are for revolution.” The “revolution” even became a “permanent revolution,” “whose goals can never be determined once and for all, but rather are continually redefined.”
However, the Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti’s return to Italy in late 1944 and the international realignment of the Allied forces – who were now clearly focused on the future of Western Europe’s reconstruction – marked the end of the “revolutionary” hopes of azionismo and the anti-fascist revolution. Palmiro Togliatti’s speech at Salerno would mark their swansong.
In this Southern town, the Communist leader asserted the need for the unity of anti-fascists of whatever political or religious orientation, and proposed that the institutional question (monarchy or republic?) be put off until after the war. Azionismo’s revolutionary and Jacobin anti-fascism had truly resonated with the aspirations of the popular, peasant, and working-class layers of Northern Italy, but this would now be defeated by the new situation of Allied “diplomatic” anti-fascism, to which Togliatti’s Communist Party added decisive impetus, shortly before the Allies reached Rome in June 1944.
There now began to emerge the image of a “betrayed” or at least “unfinished” Resistance, meaning “the incompletion of an ideal that was never fully realized, but nonetheless continued to feed hopes and to awaken stresses and energies for renewal.” As Marco Revelli wrote, “…the true mortal sin of anti-fascism consisted in its struggle against the roots, against the tradition of Italy, in its destructive charge dissolving the fundamental aggregations of fatherland and family.”
And azionismo’s “mortal sin” was not only that it kept this memory alive, but that it was able to transmit this experience over time, as well as the questions it posed to the Italy of the past, their own present, and the future. This was especially the case of Piero Calamandrei (a father of the 1948 Italian Constitution), Giorgio Agosti, Leo Valiani, Aldo Garosci, and Alessandro Galante Garrone.
Of course, the Pd’A’s was a short experience, doubtless linked to its variety of political souls and its inability to provide a common substance to the anti-fascist revolution that it considered so necessary. But azionismo remains a thorn in the side of those who hope to see the subversive potential of the Resistance experience die away as the years pass.
And indeed, with the commemorations every April 25, what is put on the agenda anew is the fact that this past can again become a force in the present. Without doubt, this is the sense in which azionismo and its “anti-fascist revolution” remain a rallying point for the oppositional Italian left today. The slogan “Now and always, Resistance!” was chanted once more on April 25, 2017, renewing the subversive potential of militant azionismo and the living force of its “permanent revolution.”
And where are we now, on this glorious anniversary of victory over fascism?
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair: Italy on the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.
But if the abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.
In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.
As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.
“What is to be done?”; as Lenin asked in the essay which ignited the Russian Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 30 2022, Centenary of the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo;
One hundred years ago this August, the antifascist resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo fought a glorious battle for the soul of humankind and the fate of the world against the tide of fascism and Mussolini’s blackshirts in Parma, prelude to the March on Rome which opened the door to the Holocaust and World War Two, so very like our own January 6 Insurrection which threatens us still with the return of fascism as the Fourth Reich.
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For Antifa and the Resistance the Arditi are an important historical ancestor, but also for all who love Liberty, where ever men hunger to be free.
Here also is a cautionary tale, of the necessity of Solidarity and the dangers of ideological fracture, for the Arditi failed to defeat fascism at its birth for the same reasons Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democrats of Germany were unable to counter the ascendence of Hitler.
To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat in battle as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
Rome, Open City film by Roberto Rossellini
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/italy-fascism-communist-party-world-war-two
August 23 2023 Anniversary of the 1922 Founding of Antifa: the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo
June 11 2020 Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
June 11 2023 Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone
Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling
Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, Lucy Hughes-Hallett
https://jacobinmag.com/2016/04/italy-liberation-mussolini-fascism-pci
The Normal and the Pathological, by Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
by Michel Foucault
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51933.Madness_and_Civilization
Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection
by Michel de Montaigne, John Florio (Translation), Stephen Greenblatt (Editor), Peter G. Platt (Editor)
The Italian Resistance, a reading list
Arditi del popolo: Argo Secondari e la prima organizzazione antifascista (1917-1922), Eros Francescangeli
The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies, Tom Behan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7390558-the-italian-resistance
A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, Claudio Pavone, Peter Levy
(Translator), Stanislao G. Pugliese (Preface)
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto, Frederika Randall (Translator)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168802-primo-levi-s-resistance
Antonio Gramsci, a reading list
Prison Notebooks: Volume I, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Translator) Columbia University Press
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85942.Prison_Notebooks
Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932, by Antonio Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg (Editor) Columbia University Press
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85937.Prison_Notebooks_Volume_2
Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives, by Kate Crehan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28592468-gramsci-s-common-sense
The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, by Peter D. Thomas
Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought, by Maurice A. Finocchiaro
Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School, by Peter Ives
Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment, by David M. Kreps
Italian
25 aprile 2024 Festa della Liberazione Italia: lezioni dalla storia per antifascisti, rivoluzionari, sinceri e portatori del fuoco prometeico che è la democrazia
Sopravvivenza e resistenza, il prezzo della libertà e la necessità della solidarietà, la fragilità del potere e l’inutilità delle tirannie della forza e del controllo di fronte al potere incontestabile del rifiuto di sottomettersi o di obbedire, il potere redentore dell’amore come comunità e l’alleanza di persone autonome. i popoli in una società libera di eguali e la natura trasformativa della libertà come scelta di rimanere invincibili; in questo giorno del gemello anniversario della Rivoluzione dei garofani in Portogallo e della Festa della Liberazione italiana celebriamo il glorioso trionfo dei nostri antenati come antifascisti e le lezioni che possiamo imparare dalla nostra storia.
Cosa possiamo imparare dalla Liberazione dell’Italia, e da tutte le liberazioni dai regimi fascisti nel corso della storia e del mondo, come antifascisti, rivoluzionari, rivelatori di verità e portatori del Fuoco Prometeico che è la democrazia?
Il grande segreto del potere è che è fragile e fragile; la forza e il controllo falliscono al punto di disobbedienza e incredulità.
La legge è al servizio del potere, l’ordine si appropria e non esiste un’Autorità giusta.
Chi non può essere costretto con la forza è libero. Nella resistenza e nel rifiuto di sottometterci all’autorità diventiamo Invitti.
Resistere è essere liberi, e questa è una sorta di vittoria che non ci può essere tolta. Il rifiuto di sottomettersi è l’atto umano determinante e la presa del potere, e questa è la prima rivoluzione in cui tutti dobbiamo combattere; la lotta per la proprietà di noi stessi.
In questo siamo tutti fratelli, sorelle e altri; tutti noi un’Umanità Unita con il dovere di prenderci cura l’uno dell’altro al di là di tutte le differenze.
È tempo di porre fine all’era degli imperi, alle monarchie e alle tirannie basate sulla forza e sul controllo, alle egemonie di ricchezza, potere e privilegio delle élite, ai fascismi di sangue, fede e suolo e alle divisioni di appartenenza ed esclusione delle élite. alterità; spalanchiamo le porte delle nostre prigioni e dei nostri confini e siamo liberi.
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 25 aprile 2020, Anniversari della vittoria italiana sul fascismo e fine della guerra civile italiana e della rivoluzione dei garofani in Portogallo; Celebrate con me oggi il gemello anniversario della vittoria italiana sul fascismo e della Rivoluzione dei garofani che liberò il Portogallo da cinquant’anni di tirannia. Insieme, questi due eventi e processi storici ci forniscono modelli esemplari di azione efficace nella lotta verso la democrazia e la vera uguaglianza del genere umano.
Tre decenni di antifascismo in Italia, culminati nei venti mesi di resistenza all’occupazione tedesca, non solo determinarono la vittoria degli Alleati e la liberazione dell’Europa, ma furono anche una lotta per trasformare la base culturale da cui sorse il fascismo; autoritarismo, patriarcato, nepotismo e corruzione, e le reti di rapporti cliente-cliente che sono persistite come base formale della società europea fin dall’Impero Romano. Come scrive Stephanie Prezioso in Jacobin “la Resistenza non fu solo una guerra di liberazione nazionale, ma anche una guerra civile e una guerra di classe – una guerra sociale che coinvolse la stessa popolazione”.
Ma ciò che è più rilevante per noi oggi è il modo in cui questa guerra dalle molteplici sfaccettature è stata condotta e vinta; poiché era anarchico e destrutturato, auto-organizzato e incorporante forme di mutualismo, non gerarchico e democratico nel miglior senso di società libere di eguali. Come dicono gli abitanti di Hong Kong della loro arte rivoluzionaria: “Sii come l’acqua”. Ancora una volta come descritto da Stephanie Prezioso; “L’autonomia, le rivendicazioni antiburocratiche, il volontarismo, la “libera iniziativa dal basso” e il ruolo dell’individuo – non della “massa” – erano i segreti interiori di questo liberalismo libertario e rivoluzionario, legato alla rivoluzione sociale”.
In che modo la storia della Resistenza antifascista italiana continua a plasmare e informare la nostra lotta oggi? Qui dobbiamo tuffarci nel profondo pozzo della memoria e situare il nostro momento nel contesto del secolo che si è svolto fin dalle nostre origini nella prima Resistenza antifascista mondiale, quella degli Arditi del Popolo fondati nel 1921 per resistere a Mussolini e all’ascesa del movimento Fascismo. Gli Aditi del Popolo, esercito operaio la cui difesa dei comuni sulle Barricate di Parma divenne leggendaria, nacque in reciproca interdipendenza con l’anarcosindacalismo del compagno di Bakunin Enrico Malatesta e lo Stato Libero di Fiume del poeta e generale Gabriele D’Annunzio. , quest’ultimo dei quali continua ancora oggi a influenzare i movimenti globali delle Zone Autonome.
Quando fondammo la prima dell’attuale rete, la Zona Autonoma di Capitol Hill a Seattle, dopo aver occupato il quartiere degli affari e del governo statale, avevo una copia del romanzo di Bruce Sterling del Fiume di D’Annunzio, Pirate Utopia, da cui lessi alle masse che hanno sequestrato la questura. Un racconto ammonitore oltre che un modello ispiratore e romantic, , poiché nello Stato Libero di Fiume D’Annunzio entrambi fondarono un’iconica comune anarchico-sindacalista ma crearono anche il fascismo; è uno studio fondamentale sulle forze ricorsive della paura, del potere e della forza e sul perché le rivoluzioni diventano tirannie. Nel centrare la mia idea di Zone Autonome Viventi in una critica dell’emergere storico del fascismo dal rifiuto totale anarchico del potere statale e del nazionalismo dal socialismo internazionalista, metto in discussione l’uso sociale della forza come terreno di lotta intrinseco a ogni scambio umano in la dualità delle sue forme come paura e appartenenza.
Come ho scritto nel mio post dell’11 giugno 2023, Ricordando la gloriosa zona autonoma di Seattle; Strano e sconosciuto rimane il Paese da scoprire, come Shakespeare chiamava il futuro, perché è una cosa di verità relative e ambigue, effimere e in costante movimento e processi di cambiamento e possibilità illimitate di divenire. “Un paese sconosciuto dal quale nessun viaggiatore ritorna – lascia perplessi la volontà”, come recita il verso dell’Amleto, in riferimento alla morte e a ciò che può trovarsi oltre i limiti dell’essere umano e della conoscenza.
Ma si applica ugualmente alle miriadi di futuri tra cui dobbiamo scegliere, modellati dalle nostre storie e dai nostri sistemi di essere umani insieme come condizioni imposte di lotta rivoluzionaria e dalla nostra visione poetica nella reimmaginazione e trasformazione dell’essere umano, del significato e del valore.
L’emergere delle Zone Autonome come adattamento spontaneo alle condizioni universali di disuguaglianza di potere e di brutale repressione da parte degli stati carcerari è stato in parte un’eco e un riflesso del movimento Occupy iniziato allo Zuccotti Park di New York il 17 settembre 2011; a ottobre quasi mille città in 82 nazioni e in 600 comunità americane avevano proteste sorelle e movimenti Occupy in corso e sostenuti. Il movimento Black Lives Matter è iniziato nel luglio del 2013 per protestare contro l’assoluzione dell’assassino di Trayvon Martin, e nel 2020 con la morte di George Floyd ha acceso l’estate del fuoco; circa 26 milioni di americani si sono uniti alle proteste in 200 città, a cui si sono aggiunte proteste sorelle in duemila città di sessanta nazioni. Le Zone Autonome sono state un prodigio della convergenza armonica di questi due movimenti globali di giustizia sociale, modellati dalle influenze del movimento antipatriarcale #metoo e dello sciopero scolastico Fridays for Future di Greta Thunberg e di altri movimenti ecologici globali.
Nelle Zone Autonome i movimenti di protesta globali contro il terrore suprematista bianco, il terrore sessuale patriarcale, la tirannia e il terrore di stato sia come movimenti democratici che come movimento per l’abolizione della polizia, ricombinati e integrati come un’agenda di lotta rivoluzionaria contro sistemi di potere ineguale.
E mentre portavamo una resa dei conti per i mali sistemici, i traumi epigenetici e le eredità delle nostre storie, abbiamo anche cercato di lanciare l’umanità verso una revisione totale del nostro essere, significato e valore, e la reimmaginazione e trasformazione delle illimitate possibilità di divenire. umano.
Ecco un mio articolo di diario che parla come testimone della storia di quel periodo di lotta rivoluzionaria e di liberazione; come ho scritto nel mio post dell’11 giugno 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Meraviglie e giubilo nelle strade, un carnevale di trasgressioni del Proibito e mascherate di possibili identità e futuri di divenire umani, anarchia, caos e gioia, impazzire ed essere ingovernabili, e lo spavento dei cavalli; vieni a ballare con noi, America. Vieni a trovare il tuo cuore e sii libero.
Chi rimane non vinto è libero. Ciascuno di noi che sfida l’ingiustizia e la tirannia, che resiste alla sottomissione, alla disumanizzazione e alla schiavitù, che mette in discussione, deride e sfida l’autorità, diventa un agente della Libertà che non può essere messo a tacere e che passa la fiaccola della libertà come catalizzatore incontrollabile di cambiare per tutti coloro con cui interagiamo, e quindi non potrà mai essere veramente sconfitto.
Ognuno di noi che resistendo diventa Invitto e portatore di Libertà diventa anche una Zona Vivente Autonoma, e questa è la chiave della nostra inevitabile vittoria. Noi stessi siamo il potere che il terrore di stato e la tirannia non possono conquistare.
La popolazione di Seattle ha risposto alla brutale repressione e alla violenza della polizia, nel tentativo di spezzare la ribellione contro l’ingiustizia razziale e i crimini d’odio messi in atto dalla Homeland Security e dalla polizia in tutta l’America e nel mondo guidata da Trump e dai suoi terroristi suprematisti bianchi sia all’interno della polizia che come gruppo quinta colonna e operando in coordinamento con forze negabili come le milizie armate ora visibili ovunque, assaltando la cittadella del governo cittadino con ondate di migliaia di cittadini che chiedono il diritto alla vita e alla libertà indipendentemente dal colore della nostra pelle.
Le persone hanno preso il controllo di sei isolati, compreso il distretto di polizia e il municipio, e hanno istituito la Zona Autonoma di Capitol Hill, un nome che risuona di storia e riflette la Comune di Parigi e la A italiana narco-sindacalisti degli anni ’20, Rojava in Siria ed Exarcheia ad Atene, ma fu modellato direttamente sugli ideali, i metodi e gli strumenti del movimento Occupy fondato a Wall Street a New York.
Che bella resistenza da parte di coloro che non andranno tranquillamente incontro alla morte. A tutti coloro che lottano contro i mulini a vento; Ti saluto.
Riprendiamoci il nostro governo dai nostri traditori e la nostra democrazia dalla tirannia fascista del sangue, della fede e della terra che ha tentato di rubare la nostra libertà e di schiavizzarci con divisioni di alterità escludente.
Quando il popolo avrà rivendicato il governo di cui è comproprietario e questa nuova fase di protesta, un movimento per occupare i municipi in spregio alla tirannia, avrà conquistato ogni sede del potere nella nazione e riportato la democrazia in America, potremo iniziare la globalizzazione della Rivoluzione e il riforgiamento della nostra società sul fondamento dell’uguaglianza e della giustizia razziale e dei nostri diritti umani universali.
Uniamoci insieme in solidarietà e ripristiniamo l’America come una società libera di eguali e liberiamo tutte le nazioni del mondo ora tenute prigioniere dal Quarto Reich.
Non può esserci che una risposta al fascismo e al terrore di stato; Mai più.
E dove siamo adesso, in questo glorioso anniversario della vittoria sul fascismo?
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 22 luglio 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Speranza e disperazione: l’Italia sull’orlo del cambiamento; Il governo italiano è crollato, un atto di sabotaggio da parte dei revivalisti fascisti che hanno abbandonato la coalizione politica che finora gli ha impedito di precipitare dall’orlo del precipizio nell’abisso, una minaccia esistenziale alla sopravvivenza dei suoi popoli e dei fondamentali servizi di qualsiasi Stato che includano l’assistenza sanitaria.
Ma se nell’abisso si nasconde il terrore di un precariato tenuto in ostaggio dalla morte e dai bisogni materiali di sopravvivenza, nell’abisso è anche il luogo della speranza, perché qui gli equilibri di potere possono essere cambiati nella lotta rivoluzionaria.
In questo momento liminale di reimmaginazione e trasformazione delle nostre possibilità di diventare umani, di presa di potere e di adempimento dei quattro doveri primari di un cittadino, interrogare l’autorità, esporre l’autorità, simulare l’autorità e sfidare l’autorità, guardiamo al nostro passato glorioso nella Resistenza che vinse con la Liberazione dell’Italia il 25 aprile e l’impiccagione di Mussolini il 28 aprile 1945.
Come dice il detto preferito di Slavoj Zizek, una traduzione errata o parafrasi francese del verso di Antonio Gramsci nei suoi Quaderni del carcere “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati”, letteralmente “La crisi consiste proprio nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere, in questo interregno compaiono una grande varietà di sintomi morbosi”, come “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, che introduce l’idea di mostruosità, riferimento allo sviluppo storico dell’idea nell’opera Il normale e il patologico di Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault e Georges Canguilhem, un processo dialettico di mimesi che sfocia nella forma del principio come; “Il vecchio mondo sta morendo e il nuovo mondo fatica a nascere; ora è il momento dei mostri”.
I significati cambiano, si adattano e cambiano mentre trasgrediscono i confini, abitano spazi pubblici e privati e si dispiegano su vasti abissi di tempo, e così dobbiamo fare noi.
“Che cosa si deve fare?”; come chiedeva Lenin nel saggio che infiammò la Rivoluzione russa.
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 30 agosto 2022, Centenario delle Barricate di Parma e della Resistenza Antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo;
Cento anni fa, in agosto, la resistenza antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo combatteva a Parma una gloriosa battaglia per l’anima dell’umanità e il destino del mondo contro l’ondata del fascismo e delle camicie nere di Mussolini a Parma, preludio alla Marcia sul Roma che ha aperto le porte all’Olocausto e alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, così simile alla nostra insurrezione del 6 gennaio che ci minaccia ancora con il ritorno del fascismo come Quarto Reich.
Ora come allora, e in ogni generazione dell’umanità, siamo definiti dal modo in cui affrontiamo coloro che vorrebbero schiavizzarci e l’oscurità dentro di noi che minaccia di consumarci, i difetti della nostra umanità e la frattura del mondo; solidali come un gruppo di fratelli e un’umanità unita, o soggiogati attraverso gerarchie e divisioni di appartenenza alle élite e alterità escludenti, come società libera di eguali o con fascismi di sangue, fede e terra. Come recita il giuramento di resistenza prestatomi da Jean Genet a Beirut; “Giuriamo lealtà gli uni agli altri, di resistere e di non cedere, e di non abbandonare i nostri simili”.
Per Antifa e la Resistenza gli Arditi sono un importante antenato storico, ma anche per tutti coloro che amano la Libertà, ovunque gli uomini abbiano fame di essere liberi.
Qui c’è anche un avvertimento sulla necessità di Solidarnosc e sui pericoli di frattura ideologica, poiché gli Arditi non riuscirono a sconfiggere il fascismo alla sua nascita per le stesse ragioni per cui Rosa Luxemburg e i socialdemocratici tedeschi non furono in grado di contrastare l’ascesa di Hitler.
A questa patologia della disconnessione e al terrore del nostro nulla, alla divisione e alla disperazione di fronte a una forza soverchiante, rispondo con Buffy the Vampire Slayer citando le istruzioni ai sacerdoti nel Book of Common Prayer nell’episodio undici della settima stagione, Showtime , dopo aver attirato un nemico in un’arena per sconfiggerlo in battaglia come dimostrazione alle sue reclute; “Non so cosa succederà dopo. Ma so che sarà proprio così: duro, doloroso. Ma alla fine saremo noi. Se tutti facciamo la nostra parte, credeteci, saremo quelli che rimarranno in piedi. Qui finisce la lezione”.
Torch of Liberty 
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